


After All These Years

by LindseyWells



Category: Original Work
Genre: Anxiety, Childhood Sexual Abuse, Depression, English football sexual abuse scandal, F/M, M/M, Panic Attacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Self-Hatred, Suicidal Thoughts, body image issues, implied/referenced eating disorder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-14
Updated: 2016-12-14
Packaged: 2018-09-08 13:02:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8846143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LindseyWells/pseuds/LindseyWells
Summary: The horrible prospect of losing his family, his teammates, and his friends agglutinates his lips.Day after day.Month after month.Year after year.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This piece was written at the beginning of December.  
> Many thanks Archer/DrWhohouselock221b from ff.net for the great beta reader service!
> 
>  
> 
> **!Dear reader, please take care of yourself and don't read this if it's going to trigger you!**

The first incident completely destroys the childish world order regulating his 10-year old life.  
So does the second, and the third, and every one after that.

"It's just a game," is what he is told each time.

 _It's not!_ , both his shame and his pain object bemusedly. Nonetheless, he keeps quiet, for his young mind is plain and simply unable to understand what is happening to him. His filial definition of the word "game" differs essentially from his coach's.

"If you're a good boy, I'll make sure you become a professional footballer. And that's what you want, isn't it?"

The dream is being held right in front of him, like bait on a hook. And despite the fact that he does not want to spend another second alone with his coach, he has to. For the sake of his dream, for the sake of his future. Football is his one true love and everybody, from his parents, to his friends and teachers, attest him an outstanding talent. He will definitely go far, there is no question about that! He just has to keep on training with all his heart and soul. With all he has to give.

"You might be a good player, but you'll never become a professional without my help!" A cobweb of words, woven from cold-blooded calculation. He feels obliged to listen to his coach and to do whatever this highly regarded man wants him to do. Trapped like an insect, he quickly realises that there is no way around the "games" if he ever wants his dream to come true. Neither struggling–"Stop that!"–nor crying–"Oh shut up!"–will ever be enough to escape the tightly laced cobweb composed of lies and emotional blackmail. He just has to play "games" with his coach again,  
and again,  
and again,  
.  
.  
.

Numbed by the acceptance of what appears to be his inevitable fate, his mind shuts down whenever the mature hands grant themselves the right to wander his body, to touch his most private parts, and to hold him down while he is being penetrated for what seems like a harrowing eternity. As soon as the pain of the uninhibited thrusts becomes unbearable, his thoughts flee into the arms of the next best distraction: the soft wind dancing through the diligently shut curtains, the TV-manufactured laughter, the tiny star-shaped stain on the sofa, or the preposterous––but for him oh so vital––idea of an insouciant future. A safe future.

All the while, he does not dare to make a single sound because he is being strangled by the fear that his coach will take the dream away from him once and for all.

"One wrong word and I'm so going to make sure they'll kick you off the team! Believe me, I can do it, and I will do it!"

No team, no club, no future as a professional footballer. All that makes perfect sense. What does not make any sense to him, though, is what he is forced to endure regularly. He really tries to understand it (Perhaps this is just how things work when you want to become a professional footballer?) but he is totally overstrained by all these unfamiliar actions. Actions he does not even have names for, let alone words to describe them.  
Despite being a nameless mystery to him, the actions do not fail to have a devastating impact on him. Within no time, they plant steady cramps in his stomach and kill his concentration during class, they boost the production of recurring nightmares and take the ability to trust other people away from him. They also put him in a state of permanent fear and sew a fatal sense of self-hate to him that overshadows his smile more and more frequently. Slowly but surely, all these effects turn into daily experiences. On some days, he is so weary that he bursts with sadness without apparent reason. Yet, he knows he has no right to be unhappy, or angry, or difficult, or however his behaviour is labelled by his parents and teachers. After all, it is all his fault. His coach told him so. And his coach is an adult and adults are always right. That is what he has been raised to believe.

"Don't even think about telling anyone! No-one's going to believe you! They will just think you made it all up because you're a pervert, a bloody faggot! And nobody wants faggots on his team or his family! They'll kick you out in no time!"

The horrible prospect of losing his family, his teammates, and his friends agglutinates his lips.  
Day after day.

Month after month.

 

Year after year.

 

 _Maybe you can forget it, just forget it all. Then it's almost like it never happened_. The thought turns into a loyal companion, never leaving his side, just like all the other troubling feelings: the fear, the panic, the self-reproaches and, of course, the nagging guilt. Over the intervening years, he stems himself against the towering flood of emotions and memories, over and over again. Each time it is like trying to stop a tsunami with pure willpower. It is in vain. His life is dictated by the trauma nourished by years of sexual and emotional abuse. He cannot escape from it, no matter how much he trains or how fast he runs on the pitch. The horrific feelings are always there, devouring most of his energy. Under these circumstances, focusing on his life and doing his best is practically impossible.

And whenever he meets his reflection in a mirror, any time he sees his face, he could swear the nasty truth is tattooed in capital letters all over it. For some reason, though, all the people surrounding him never catch a glimpse of it. He either does not let them get close enough to read it or they just simply ignore it. In any case, he has long understood what had happened to him. Due to adolescence, realisation has overgrown his mind like mould. He cannot tell whether ageing and realisation made things better or worse for him. He only knows that he is an adult now. A fully grown man who is neither naïve, nor helpless, nor running after a childhood dream any longer. He is solely disillusioned, ailing, and rancid. Like some worn toy––and there surely is no dignity at all in being reduced to a toy. As a matter of fact, it makes him feel like his humanity has been stolen from him, and now, day-in and day-out, he worries that someone might discover his degrading secret and see what he really is. Hence, all of his behaviour is ruled by unremitting caution and the dreadful vision of being unmasked and dragged in the spotlight.

**"Pervert!"**  
**"Faggot!"**  
**"No-one will ever believe you!"**  
**"This is all your fault!"**

Even after all these years, his coach's voice is still with him, insulting him, threatening him, snatching the last bits of life quality from him. The raspy words cause him severe headaches and catapult him into sudden panic attacks. If he could, he would grab into his head and rip every single memory out off it, crumple them into a tight ball and kick them right into the far distance, where no-one will ever be able to find them. Unfortunately, he cannot do so. He only manages to teach himself how to fit a padlock to his soul, so that nobody else will ever be able to hurt him like the man whom he once admired and who had nothing better in mind than rewarding a little boy's trust with sexual exploitation.

Till today, he has not outgrown the inexorable feeling of isolation that makes him believe he is out of place basically everywhere, even among family and friends. His shame trained him to be a champion in withdrawing from people, which is hardly a surprise considering the fact that, even in 2016, a huge part of society claims persistently that men cannot be raped. He knows better, though, still bleeding from the invisible wound that trauma cut into his soul. The continuing flow of memories corrodes his emotional balance and thereby has a disastrous influence on both his career and his personal relationships. There is so much anger, so much sorrow, so much depression bottled up in him––and with each day passing by, it only gets worse. He screams at people he loves dearly, he misses training sessions and important games due to injuries he has to fake since he is in no state to get out off bed, and his wife almost divorces him because she is sick and tired of his unpredictable mood swings and reticence. The words to describe how disgusted he is with himself do not exist. . .

Entirely convinced that he is a consistently awful person, he cannot bring himself to ask for help and consequently has to treat his wound himself. The measures he takes to stitch it up are stuporous and barely able to keep him alive: he hides his tears at home and shields his insecurities behind a perfectly practised smile in public. Sometimes he has two or three beers too much, sometimes he hardly eats for weeks. Mostly, however, he works himself to exhaustion on the pitch or in the gym. And if he still cannot fall asleep afterwards, he listens to the inviting lullaby suicide sings to him.

It is tragic beyond words that, in theory, he has come to understand that child abuse is never the child's fault. In practice, though, the knowledge does not stop him from blaming himself. For if he really is not guilty, then why cannot he just get rid of the pestering feelings?  
While every part of his life is crushed under the inconceivable weight of his secret, adults all over the world are still wondering why children do not speak up, why they merely seem to tolerate what is done to them. Obviously, it is quite difficult for unharmed adults to put themselves back into the mind of a vulnerable child, that has no concept of sexuality but is forced to sexual practices anyway.  
He swallows hard against the bitter taste of bile conquering his tongue at the thought of all this. Eyes tired from another nightmare-plagued night, he forces himself to take a shower and get dressed. Without any trace of appetite, he sits down at the kitchen table and scrolls through the latest news displayed on his smartphone. It is then that he stumbles upon an online article in _The Guardian_ dealing with the story of former professional footballer Andy Woodward, who was sexually abused by one of his coaches for years and who is firmly convinced that he is not an isolated case.

Sitting stiff as a poker, his brain needs an indefinite time to process all the information it just got fed with. All along, invisible blood pours out off his gravely injured soul and takes the shape of hot tears, streaming quickly down his unshaven face. His racing heart feels as if it is about to get mashed between his rips and his trembling fingers are as cold as icicles. Blinking distraughtly, he slowly realises that he is everything but alone in this misery. There are other people out there, other men, other footballers, who can relate to his pain because their personalities, relationships, emotions, and futures were butchered by similar experiences.

His lips crack open, just enough for one of his tears to trickle down his upper lip and eventually slip into his mouth. The taste is that of dusty cobwebs, spun decades ago in order to catch and muzzle an innocent boy. At this very moment, though, the once little boy who has long grown into a man doubts the cobwebs' eternal tear resistance for the first time.

**Author's Note:**

> This is just the end of this piece. Please do not mistake it for the end of this man's struggle. I could dedicate so many more pages to the complex feelings resulting from finally opening up to someone, or to the hard and exhausting work that going through therapy actually is, or to the daily growing dimensions of this abuse scandal. Still, I decided to end this piece like this-at least for now.


End file.
